LIMITED PEEK-A-BOO

Fourth Amendment Respected By High Court

Busting people who are really good at getting away with breaking the law
sounds good -- until you know by what means the illegal acts come to a halt.

The U.S. Supreme Court this week rightly brought the Fourth Amendment into
our high-tech age. The Fourth Amendment was written to protect the
citizenry against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government,

At issue was whether Danny Kyllo, a Florence, Ore., man, received fair
Fourth Amendment treatment when federal drug agents used a thermal imaging
device to figure out what was happening inside of the man's home. The
agents did not have a search warrant.

With the thermal imaging device, the agents were able to hunch that the
heat detected from inside the house represented high-intensity lamps used
to grow marijuana. Kyllo was in fact growing the drug.

Lower courts ruled that law enforcers did have a right to steal a peek into
Kyllo's home with their high-tech snoop machine. But the Supreme Court
righted this wrong, returning to the intent of our founders in writing the
Fourth Amendment: that what happens in a person's home is his private
business, unless the government has enough evidence to warrant a search. As
the majority court opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia said, using
the technology "to explore details of the home that would previously have
been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a search
and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant."

It's no fun having to thank a willing law breaker for keeping freedom in
tact, but Danny Kyllo's experience with thermal imaging helped do just that.

Behind closed doors In Clark County, similar privacy concerns are being
raised over the purchase of some new night-vision scopes for use by the
Clark County Sheriff's Office. The equipment cannot see or sense what is
going on behind a wall, but it can help law enforcers see people's faces
from a greater distance and in the dark.

The critical point of consideration for information gathering using
high-tech tools is where a person or activity is being watched.

If two drug dealers are making an exchange in the park and a cop uses
night-vision equipment to more clearly see that activity, that's different
than using high-tech equipment to watch what is happening behind someone's
closed doors.

So don't be afraid of the equipment; question government discretion. And be
relieved that the high court took the high road on this issue, returning to
the nation's roots in crafting sound precedent for the use of high-tech
gadgetry.